Search - Cecil Taylor :: The Tree of Life

Cecil's Greatest Hits

Joe Pierre | Los Angeles, CA United States | 01/13/2006

(5 out of 5 stars)

""Tree of Life" is a live solo outing, recorded in Berlin in 1991, just a few years following Cecil's landmark residence there in 1988 that spawned the famous FMP boxed set. Solo Cecil is the way to start if you're a neophyte to his music and this disc is an excellent and classic display of the full palate of CT's artistry. The first track starts with some rattling of hand cymbals and then some guttural chanting that CT often favors at the start of performances, as he enters the stage and approaches the piano. Unfortunately, he's rarely well miked when he does this, and so you have to strain to hear him or crank up the volume, but his utterances are more about the sound than the actual logical word meaning anyway, in this way paralleling his piano playing. After this one-minute intro, track 2 starts in explorative fashion with some light touch and abbreviated phrases. These become increasingly complex, interwoven, loud, and chaotic after the 10-minute mark as CT constructs, or maybe decontructs, the music. There are lots of thundering 10-finger mirror chords throughout the 45 minute section, while still allowing for considerable space, unlike some other CT recordings (and this is reason to start with the solo music). With track 3, CT returns to some brief drumming and chanting somewhere on stage (was this an extended encore?), but soon enough sits back at the Bosendorfer and returns with a 20-minute revisitation of his trademark cluster attacks, chordal slams, and rumbling-low register to trinkling-high register two-handed runs. Tracks 4 and 5 are shorter encores that again typify Cecil's concert format, restating and re-exploring musical themes, but in a rather more restrained fashion, ultimately bringing the concert length to over 70 minutes.



As an owner of some 40+ CT recordings, many of them landmark solo works, this concert strikes me as something of a greatest hits album in that he's used many of the phrases, attacks, and themes heard here elsewhere. Of course, you can't hum any detectable melody, but you can recognize signature motifs from various other recordings. There isn't as much furious, break-neck stuff here, but there is plenty of emotion, fury, and chord-slamming along with some more gentle explorations. This recording is therefore a great place to start as a very representative work, but as a CT veteran who collects his solo work, I'd rank it below the Garden, Willisau, For Olim, or East Berlin solo concerts -- mostly because I've heard it before. Don't get me wrong though, if you don't have those other concerts (or even if you do), you can't go wrong here -- it's classic Cecil and features a little bit of everything.





"